Open Stack

Hi Niki,

We plan to open it this year. In order to stick with the overall summit timeline we need to close the CFP submissions on Feb 1. If we push back on that date then it will create a domino effect for many other moving pieces. However, in reality 90% of all submissions end up coming in during the last 5 to 10 days before the deadline anyway. So we don't expect to receive may submissions until mid January anyway. :)

As soon as the tool updates have been made and tested we'll open the CFP platform to receive submissions. In the meantime, hopefully later this week, we'll go ahead and publish the landing page that explains the different tracks so that folks can begin to start drafting / brainstorming on submission content. 

Cheers,
Claire

> On Dec 14, 2015, at 6:56 PM, Niki Acosta (nikacost) <nikacost at cisco.com> wrote:
> 
> Is the CFP going to open up this month? I had kinda heard that, but I’m secretly hoping it doesn’t open until after the holidays. :)
> 
> 
> 
> Niki Acosta
> Cloud Evangelist
> Cisco Intercloud Services
> (e) nikacost at cisco.com
> (c) (+1) 512-912-6716
> (t) @nikiacosta 
> 
> 
> From: Lauren Sell <lauren at openstack.org>
> Date: Sunday, December 13, 2015 at 8:29 PM
> To: Kyle Mestery <mestery at mestery.com>
> Cc: "openstack-track-chairs at lists.openstack.org" <openstack-track-chairs at lists.openstack.org>
> Subject: Re: [Openstack-track-chairs] Call for Speakers Feedback, Next Steps
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Thank you again for your input. To summarize the conversation last week, we are planning to implement the following changes to the call for speakers process:
> Add stronger language to discourage product pitching in the proposal form
> Limit the number of sessions each speaker can submit to 3 (we’ll need help communicating this to the community)
> Make the speaker bio *required* (rather than optional) and provide the *option* to link to past Summit presentations or other speaking examples
> Add the following questions to solicit more information about each proposed session:
> What should attendees expect to learn in this session?
> Why should this session be selected?
> Please provide any relevant links to additional information, such as code repositories, case studies, papers, blog posts, etc.
> (Note, we will have structured tags for audience and level of content, so these areas will also be addressed in the submission form, just not as free form questions)
> For reference, you can see all of the etherpad notes here: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/austin-call-for-speakers
> 
> Additionally, we are planning to create a new landing page explaining the different tracks before you click through to submit a proposal. Hopefully this will help potential speakers align their presentation topics with our themes, as well as better communicate the event and program to prospective attendees. Please note we attempted to create high level themes, which in effect group related tracks to better communicate which topics will be presented on which days ahead of the full agenda being released.
> 
> I’ve provided an early look at the high level schedule and tracks, and welcome any input on the specific themes or keywords you’d like to see related to your area of expertise. Please add any comments about themes and keywords in the google doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-33IWJL4d5g99aAGsm7bc7MC0EqVmVwUxUSfEsuTkDc/edit#gid=0
> 
> Thanks for your help.
> 
> Best,
> Lauren
> 
> 
>> On Dec 10, 2015, at 2:04 PM, Kyle Mestery <mestery at mestery.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 12:33 PM, Lauren Sell <lauren at openstack.org> wrote:
>>> Thanks everyone for jumping on this thread and providing such great feedback! This makes me excited to raise the bar for content at the Austin Summit. 
>>> 
>>> We’ve started an etherpad to summarize the feedback from the thread. Please jump in with anything we’ve missed, as well as to provide your thoughts next to the current proposals.
>>> 
>>> https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/austin-call-for-speakers
>>> 
>>> It seems like limiting the number of sessions each speaker can submit to 3 and adding additional questions to the submission form (such as links to resources, past speaking example videos, more questions about objectives & audience) have pretty strong support from the group. 
>> 
>> ++, this is all good and will help track chairs in selecting appropriate sessions.
>>  
>>> One follow up question to Daniel’s point below — if we asked speakers to submit draft presentations a week before the Summit, do you think track chairs would be willing to scan through them for any obvious product pitches or deviations from the original submission? I doubt we’d get 100% compliance from presenters, but it could be a good start. I put that proposal in the etherpad under Speaker Management if you want to comment there.
>> 
>> I'm not sure this would work, both because perpetrators of the product pitch sessions could just not upload their slides, and because track chairs are already heavily involved in the summit themselves. The gain for the amount of pain doesn't seem to justify this IMHO.
>>  
>>> Ideally we can come up with a few concrete changes for this cycle, as well as plans we can start putting in place for Barcelona.
>>> 
>>> Thank you again!
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On Dec 10, 2015, at 11:30 AM, Daniel Krook <krook at us.ibm.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> There are a lot of great ideas in this thread and the parallel responses. Picking the best of these ideas is almost as much work as selecting presentations. :)
>>>> 
>>>> I agree it's time to consolidate them into an Etherpad to see we can "vote" on the ideas by the end of the week before the Austin CfP goes out.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> My own take:
>>>> 
>>>> - I like the idea to add the additional questions in Lauren's original email, and the idea of optional fields for "extra credit" highlighting speaking experience at previous Summits, meetups, recorded demos, etc. We recommend that submitters include much of that information to create strong abstracts in the some of our guidance anyway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxFYNZ4jqik
>>>> 
>>>> - Moving talks or somehow autocategorizing talks between tracks could be smoother. I don't like seeing a whole new slew of talks that were moved in at the last minute after I've done an initial ranking. As a chair on the Related OSS track, I'm also not 100% sure when a particular talk should be in my talk or Containers (e.g. Docker) or Operations (e.g. SaltStack). Maybe a co-vote between tracks and track chairs on content that sits in the gray areas? Maybe we add an "uncategorized/waivers bucket" and have track chairs proactively "draft/categorize" the talks they think fit into their own track that may have been "cut/decategorized" from another talk?
>>>> 
>>>> - We should require presenters to submit an early draft a week ahead of the event, like the Linux Foundation CfP site does. This forces speakers to at least submit a semi-complete outline (beneficial whether it's a weak talk at that point or they are procrastinators, it could also tilt their hand on marketing content, and possibly give them a less stressful Summit attending experience (more time to attend other talks rather than work on their own talk)). But this would still allow for up to-the-minute of the talk refinements, as the submitter controls the device used to do the actual presentation. This also somewhat mitigates the problem of biting off more than they can chew if giving more than one presentation by forcing them to create content earlier.
>>>> 
>>>> - While I think 2 presenters is an ideal limit for speakers per talk, I'm OK with allowing for up to 4, as this provides an opportunity for more experienced presenters to mentor younger co-speaking colleagues and to attribute talks to those who are shy or otherwise can't attend the Summit (but contributed to talk content nonetheless).
>>>> 
>>>> - For the same reason, I don't like the idea of limiting submissions per person (or number of talks for which they are an additional speaker). In some talks they may be the main presenter, others a minor co-presenter and possibly mentoring others, or they were  reached out with for their opinion to strengthen a panel submitted by someone else. 
>>>> 
>>>> - For those two reasons and the logistical questions several already raised by others, I don't think we should limit submissions by company affiliation. 
>>>> 
>>>> - I personally think there's some value in the community voting, and that should influence the initial ordering of what the track chairs see when they log in the very first time, but I understand it's not a common opinion. :)
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Daniel Krook
>>>> Senior Software Engineer, IBM Cloud
>>>> Distinguished IT Specialist (The Open Group & IBM Senior Certified)
>>>> 
>>>> <0E327443.jpg><0E696251.jpg><0E483644.jpg><0E434558.jpg><0E317065.jpg>
>>>> krook.info	
>>>> <0E100292.gif>
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> <graycol.gif>Kendall Waters ---12/10/2015 11:46:24 AM---Hi Salvatore, The session feedback response rate from Tokyo was much lower than expected. This may b
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> From: Kendall Waters <kendall at openstack.org>
>>>> To: Salvatore Orlando <salv.orlando at gmail.com>
>>>> Cc: "openstack-track-chairs at lists.openstack.org" <openstack-track-chairs at lists.openstack.org>
>>>> Date: 12/10/2015 11:46 AM
>>>> Subject: Re: [Openstack-track-chairs] Call for Speakers Feedback, Next Steps
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Hi Salvatore,
>>>> 
>>>> The session feedback response rate from Tokyo was much lower than expected. This may be partly due to the wifi quality at the Summit as well as the unreliable mobile app. It could also be that attendees simply didn’t know about it. We are hard at work building a new mobile app for the Austin Summit, which will have feedback forms for each session built into the app. We also plan to shorten the feedback survey to just 2 questions where the attendee can rate the session and then leave text feedback if desired. We are hoping this will increase the response rate in Austin and help track chairs during the selection process in the future. 
>>>> 
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> Kendall
>>>> 
>>>> Kendall Waters
>>>> OpenStack Marketing
>>>> kendall at openstack.org
>>>> 
>>>> On Dec 9, 2015, at 3:42 PM, Salvatore Orlando <salv.orlando at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> I think the huge number of submissions that we get is kind of reasonable, considering the importance of the Openstack summit event.
>>>> Nevertheless, it is more than fair to add some rigour to the submission process.
>>>> 
>>>> The three proposed additional questions are good in my opinion. They should actually be part of any talk abstract.
>>>> I think it could be worth trying to encourage submitters to add some evidence of the meat behind the abstract being reviewed.
>>>> Examples of such evidence could be:
>>>> - code repositories
>>>> - blog posts
>>>> - whitepapers, academic papers, or technical reports
>>>> - previous related work
>>>> - videos, slides, etc.
>>>> 
>>>> I don't think this will lead to less submission, but would help the track chairs team to "fast-reject" talks which appear to not have decent standards.
>>>> 
>>>> This could be achieved with an "additional material" section.
>>>> Obviously I don't want to force submitters to disclose any IP-protected material, though if that was the case a submission to the openstack summit shouldn't probably even be considered.
>>>> 
>>>> For the track chairs team going through a nomination and selection process each time sounds good to me. There are probably some open questions around criteria for selecting chairs and confirming people who did the chair duty in the previous cycle, but I guess the foundation already has a process in place.
>>>> 
>>>> For the public voting system, I think it's useless at the moment. I second the idea of having an interface where one could rank the talks he/she is interested in and not rank at all the talks that are deemed not good enough to be presented.
>>>> 
>>>> For the selection process from track chairs, I'do instead for a process where talk proposal are evaluated first regardless of public voting (scoring could be "strong accept"/"weak accept"/"weak reject"/"strong reject"/"definitely meh"). And then accepted talks can be ranked to fill available slots taking also into account, if useful, the public voting outcome.
>>>> 
>>>> On another note... do we have the feedback from the Tokyo talks? I'd like to see what the audience thought of the talks that were selected.
>>>> 
>>>> Salvatore
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On 9 December 2015 at 21:55, Niki Acosta (nikacost) <nikacost at cisco.com> wrote:
>>>> My thoughts, for what its worth: 
>>>> 
>>>> Cap it at three submissions per person, including panels. 
>>>> Strongly discourage straight up product-pitching sessions. 
>>>> Would be cool to review sessions to take a first pass at what actually makes it to voting. There were far too many sessions to vote on. 
>>>> The voting system is kinda painful. It would be useful to see a list of sessions for any given track and stack rank them, versus voting on them one by one. 
>>>> Requirement to the submission form: allow someone to post a link to a previous recorded presentation. It would be helpful for trackchairs to review in the event there’s a tie. 
>>>> 
>>>> Also— I’ve noticed that some track reassignments happened too late— in some cases, after final selections had been made. We should really press for a cutoff date for track re-assignments that is far enough in advance of the final selections deadline to make sure track chairs are considering all of the sessions in the track. 
>>>> 
>>>> :)
>>>> 
>>>> Niki Acosta
>>>> Cloud Evangelist
>>>> Cisco Intercloud Services
>>>> (e) nikacost at cisco.com
>>>> (c) (+1) 512-912-6716
>>>> (t) @nikiacosta 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> From: Lauren Sell <lauren at openstack.org>
>>>> Date: Wednesday, December 9, 2015 at 2:44 PM
>>>> To: "openstack-track-chairs at lists.openstack.org" <openstack-track-chairs at lists.openstack.org>
>>>> Subject: [Openstack-track-chairs] Call for Speakers Feedback, Next Steps
>>>> 
>>>> Hello Tokyo Summit track chairs,
>>>> 
>>>> We’re moving quickly to open the call for speakers for the Austin Summit next week and want to make sure we incorporate feedback from prior discussions on this list. Unfortunately, we didn’t have much turnout in Tokyo for the Summit tools & processes session, where we were hoping to facilitate more discussion. We only had two people show up (outside of Foundation staff), so we primarily discussed the mobile app and reviewed the prototype.
>>>> 
>>>> Based on earlier feedback in this thread, there is a desire to manage the growing number of submissions while increasing the quality. We have two levers we could pull for the submission process, but need to make decisions by the end of this week:
>>>> 1. Do we want to cap the number of sessions that each person can submit at 5?
>>>> 2. Do we want to add any questions or requirements to the submission form? See suggestions below. 
>>>> 
>>>> For #2, we are already making a few minor changes this round to improve session tagging and ask speakers for “links to past presentations” and “areas of expertise.” For the session submission, we currently ask:
>>>> Session Title
>>>> Session level (beginner, intermediate, advanced)
>>>> Abstract
>>>> Short Description (450 characters max for YouTube and mobile app)
>>>> Select track from dropdown
>>>> Tags
>>>> I would suggest consolidating the abstract and short description to be one question (because submitters often copy/paste it anyway), and then ask a few additional questions:
>>>> Who is the intended audience for your session? Please be specific.
>>>> What is the problem or use case you’re addressing in this session?
>>>> What should attendees expect to learn?
>>>> We are also making a few changes to the tracks, primarily grouping them into content categories to better promote and layout the content across the week. 
>>>> 
>>>> Finally, we will very soon need to select the next round of track chairs. The Foundation has typically accepted nominations from the community and appointed track chairs based on subject matter expertise, contributions, working group involvement, etc. To help bring in new perspectives, one proposal was to ask track chairs to decide two people from their team who would continue for the next cycle and nominate two new people from the community to keep things fresh. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback that another community vote for track chairs is not desirable, but we could more broadly communicate the window for nominations. We’re accepting nominations now (email summit at openstack.org) and hope to have track chairs decided by mid-January. Any thoughts on the process? 
>>>> 
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Lauren 
>>>> 
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